Apheresis

A medical procedure that withdraws whole blood from a donor or patient, mechanically separates out one or more specific components (such as platelets, plasma, or stem cells), and returns the remaining blood to the circulation. The technique enables efficient collection of targeted blood products or removal of pathogenic elements while preserving the donor’s red-cell mass and overall volume. In linguistics the same term denotes the historical loss of a sound or syllable at the beginning of a word, as in “round” from Old English “around.”